DCI Smith merged the OSO (being mainly espionage, and newly led by Helms) and the rapidly expanding Office of Policy Coordination under Wisner (covert operations) to form a new unit to be managed by the deputy director for plans (DDP).

Under the DDP Helms was specifically tasked in the defense of the agency against the threatened attack by Senator Joseph McCarthy, and also in the development of "truth serum" and other "mind control" drugs per the CIA's controversial Project MKUltra.

Regarding CIA activity, Helms considered information obtained by espionage to be more beneficial in the long run than the more strategically risky work involved in covert operations, which could backfire politically.

"[16] American intelligence agents had a relatively long history in Vietnam, dating back to OSS contacts with the communist-led resistance to Japanese occupation forces during World War II.

[18] After French withdrawal in 1954, CIA officers including Lt. Col. Edward Lansdale assisted the new President Ngo Dinh Diem in his efforts to reconstitute an independent government in the south: the Republic of Viet Nam.

Many of its analysts reluctantly understood that, in the anti-colonialist and nationalist context then prevailing, a favorable outcome was more likely for the new communist regime in the north under its long-term party leader Ho Chi Minh, who was widely admired as a Vietnamese patriot.

Helms acknowledges that after Nixon, through his agent Kissinger, negotiated in Paris to end the Vietnam war in 1973, America failed to continue supporting its allies and "abdicated its role in Southeast Asia."

[62][63] Helms elaborates on the turnabout: In 1970, it came as a jolt when, with a group of senators, Stuart Symington publicly expressed his "surprise, shock and anger" at what he and the others claimed was their "recent discovery" of "CIA's secret war" in Laos.

[85][86] In the afternoon of the third day of the war, the American SIGINT spy ship USS Liberty, outfitted by the NSA, was attacked by Israeli warplanes and torpedo boats in international waters north of Sinai.

[98][99] As a result of the CIA's accurate prognosis concerning the duration, logistics, and outcome of the Six-Day War of June 1967, Helms' practical value to the President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, became evident.

[124][125] As a major element in his counterinsurgency policy, Ngo Dinh Diem (President 1954–1963) had earlier introduced the establishment of strategic hamlets in order to contest Viet Cong operations in the countryside.

The American staff did its best to eliminate the abuse of authority—the settling of personal scores, rewarding of friends, summary executions, prisoner mistreatment, false denunciation, illegal property seizure—that became the by-products of the PHOENIX counterinsurgency effort.

[152][153] If one discounts the corrupt criminality and its political fallout, the Phoenix partisans were perhaps better able tactically to confront the elusive Viet Cong support networks, i.e., the sea in which the fish swam, than the regular units of the ARVN and the U. S.

[167] Helms writes, "In his typically unvarnished manner, George had presented a bleak but accurate view of the situation and again demonstrated that the NVN strength in South Vietnam was far stronger than had been previously reported by MACV."

[207] With the sudden rise in the United States during the mid-1960s of the opposition to the Vietnam War, President Johnson had become suspicious, surmising that foreign communists must be supplying various protest groups with both money and organization skills.

"[217] A young lawyer, Tom Charles Huston, was then selected by Nixon in 1970 to manage a marked increase in the surveillance of domestic dissenters and protesters: a multi-agency investigative effort, more thorough and wider in scope.

[226]One CIA analyst, Abbott Smith, viewed this flip-flop not only as "a cave-in on a matter of high principle", according to author John Ranelagh, "but also as a public slap in the face from his director, a vote of no confidence in his work."

[255][259] Thereafter, the CIA funneled millions of dollars to opposition groups, e.g., political parties, the media, and striking truck drivers, in a continuing, long-term effort to destabilize Chile's economy and so subvert the Allende administration.

[271] Although elected with 36.3% of the vote (to 34.9% for runner-up in a three-way contest), Allende as President reportedly ignored the Constitución de 1925 in pursuit of his socialist policies, namely, ineffective projects which proved very unpopular and polarizing.

[287] Nixon's team (chiefly Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean) then asked Helms in effect to assert a phony national security reason for the break-in and, under that rationale, to interfere with the ongoing FBI investigation of the Watergate burglaries.

At several meetings attended by Helms and Walters, Nixon's team referred to the Cuban Bay of Pigs fiasco, using it as if a talisman of dark secrets, as an implied threat against the integrity of CIA.

About the immediate court, however, a U.N. official wrote, "There was an atmosphere of overwhelming nouveau-riche, meretricious chi-chi and sycophancy ..."[335][336] Helms himself managed to circulate widely among the traditional elites, e.g., becoming a "close friend" of the aristocrat Ahmad Goreishi.

While serving as ambassador to Iran (1973–1977), Helms was required to travel from Tehran to Washington sixteen times, thirteen in order to give testimony "before various official bodies of investigation" including the President's Rockefeller Commission.

Consequently, Helms became utterly dismayed at the various investigations of USG intelligence agencies, especially when they resulted in the publication or broadcast of classified information, highly sensitive, that had previously remained secret.

At some point, the recorded facts of Helms's testimony ostensibly moved to territory outside the perimeters of the previously prevailing quiet and confidential understandings with Congress, and entered an arena in which new and different rules applied: those of transparency.

[416] Other interview requests arrived, and eventually Helms was queried by many authors and journalists including Edward Jay Epstein,[417] Thomas Powers,[418] John Ranelagh,[419] William Shawcross,[420] and Bob Woodward.

The Phoenix Program was aimed at kidnapping or eliminating enemy leaders, not true pacification—as I had envisioned it.It was bound to be a rocky period with Richard Nixon as President, given the fact that he held the Agency responsible for his defeat in 1960.

meetings, pick on the Agency for not having properly judged what the Soviets were going to do ..." Helms concludes: "Dealing with him was tough, it seems to me that the fact that I ended up with my head on my shoulders after four years of working with him is not the least achievement of my life" (at 10).

"The CIA, directly violating its charter, conducted a massive illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon Administration against anti-war movement and other dissent groups in the United States.CIA's reputation depends on straightforward, honest relations with both the executive branch and the Congress.

There's no way that the deputy DCI could have furnished secret funds to the Watergate crowd without permanently damaging and perhaps even destroying the Agency.Helms' appointment to Tehran inevitably gave rise to lurid speculations about the nature of CIA control over the Shah.